Email Marketing Program Tour

Intro

Walk Softly's email marketing program is a web-based service, which means there's no software to install, and you can log into your account from any place. And unlike many services, ours works on both PCs and Macs.

Inside your account, things are organized neatly into three areas: audience, campaigns and response. Our interface is designed to be highly intuitive - there are no technology skills required here.

Step 1 - Build your audience through sign-up screens

You can build your audience for your email marketing campaigns by creating one or more custom signup screens that let new people sign up for your emails directly from your website, your email campaigns, or virtually anywhere. When someone new signs up, he or she is automatically added to the group(s) you've selected. Want to see who's joined your list recently? Simply sort your members by signup date.

Step 2 - Build your audience through import wizard

Walk Softly also makes it easy to import your existing list. Most imports finish in minutes, and we automatically weed out duplicates during the import process. Need to re-import a list that's grown? No worries. Only add new people, or perform an add-and-update to append your current records with new information.

Step 3 - Create your email campaign with your own brand stationary

When it comes to your email campaigns, we get you started out right, with a custom-designed brand stationery that frames your emails and impresses your audience.

We also build some important features into your stationery for you, including links to help your recipients forward your email, manage their preferences, sign up, contact you, and more. You'll provide your recipients with helpful tools, and you'll remain Can-Spam compliant.

Step 4 – Select a layout and add text and images to your email campaign

Creating your email newsletters and campaigns has never been so easy. You'll start by opening your brand stationery and then choosing one of nearly 39 layouts for the content you'll add to it. Go one column or two, add images and captions - it's all in your hands and it's all quite easy.

Once you've picked a layout, it's easy to add text and images, format everything (without using html), and preview your work. We'll even build the plain-text version of the email for you, then let you preview and fine-tune that as well.

Step 5 - Add webpage links, email addresses or documents to your campaign

We also makes it easy to link your recipients to web-pages, email addresses, and even PDFs and other documents you can upload to your handy document library. It's the best way to distribute files to your audience without having to send the dreaded attachments.

When your campaign is ready, you'll preview your work and then proof it - to double-check your email for any words, links or content that could increase your spam score or cause delivery issues - all before you ever hit send.

Step 6 - Determine who should receive your email campaign masterpiece

Ready to send? You'll set your from name and address, pick the groups who'll receive it, and either send now or schedule for later. You can also use the trigger email feature to have an email sent automatically when someone signs up, has a birthday, and more.

Once you hit send, our servers deliver your emails, re-try periodically to unresponsive servers, process bounces, and basically handle the complex process and art of email delivery so you don't have to.

Step 7 – Sit back and get ready to review the responses

This is when the real fun begins. As people begin receiving and opening your emails, our program will begin reporting the activity back to you in real time - all in one extremely handy summary screen. But the response tracking doesn't stop there. If 30 people opened, you can click that total and find out who opened and when they did it. Same goes for all response totals, like bounces, clicks, forwards and more.

You can compare past campaigns side by side with a click of a button, and you can target your next email to people who opened, clicked or otherwise responded to your last one. We store your past response online for 18 months, and you can export any campaign's results in spreadsheet form and keep it forever. And ever. You get the idea.

Summary

In short, Walk Softly offers everything you need to manage and grow your audience, create and send stylish email newsletters and campaigns, and track your response in real time - all in an easy-to-use, Web-based account with new features being added every month.